Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change

by Beth Comstock

formal growth board serves to deliver discipline around key decisions in funding, testing, allocating resources for projects, and new businesses. I believe growth boards are fundamental to driving innovation in an organization. Here is the framework for organizing a growth board: Convene a cross-functional group of decision-makers with enough different perspectives to add value; the smaller the group, the better. All decisions are made here; there are no back-room deals. Leverage your core set of questions as projects move through the various stages. Ideas/projects are greenlighted only as they move through each stage, meaning they pass the test for should versus can; gaining traction is moving from one to many customers; scale means that the products work as described and the commercial model is sound and growing. Beware that growth boards don’t become overly bureaucratic or that you start adding growth boards beyond where they are useful. In venture capital, Mondays are set aside to convene partners, make funding decisions, and send pitches back for more work or decline them completely. VCs are pitched thousands of ideas a year; only a few dozen are funded. I use this approach for funding any project with my teams, not just for new businesses. For example, when digitizing workflows or our sales teams across GE, I convened a group of commercial leaders; we agreed to jointly pool our resources—budget, people, capabilities—in a way that would scale the best ideas fastest. E...